The Shattered Star

This is a good article explaining what we are all gonna expect on the 19th.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/ne ... rience.ars

To be honest I'm not altogether sure what to make of the New Experience yet. Whilst the article makes some significant points - the need for lag removal and an overhaul of Marketplace specifically - I can't say I particularly like the style they've gone about it in. Looks very....Wii. Childish, silly, rather than the functional interface it now has.

Maybe I'm in the minority here but I don't particularly care for having an Avatar or shiny new slider graphics. It feels unnecessary, and I just want the Dashboard to be functional - not be half shiny, quarter social networking, and a quarter functional. And that's really what puts me off.

Of course, it's difficult to make a final judgement until I see it in place and working, but at this point in time I think that overall I'd probably have been much happier if they'd just kept the same layout and improved the response times and the Marketplace section. We'll see though, good article anyway.

Well I am not fond of Avatars either. It's par for MS's course to copy their competition, so this is nothing new. At least they allow me to use my Gamerpics if I really want to. But the Marketplace really was an atrocious piece of work. Yeah you and I are used to it because we have been using it for a while. Again part of MS's M.O. They make things with lousy UI's. We get accustomed to it and it seems fine.

My best friend who just acquired his Box recently pointed out such issues. (He also works for Apple so there may be a bit of bias there.) He is a big Marketplace user so he immediately pointed out what was wrong with it, and to be honest I can't really disagree with his sentiment either. So some of these changes are certainly welcome.

I think the overall look of the NXE is pretty snazzy tbh. I haven't been playing the 360 for as long as the rest of you so you'll probably be more accustomed to the current blade interface than i am, but i'm looking forward to this.
I like the sound of the HD Netflix, hope that comes to the UK as well eventually. (At the end of the day though that would depend how much it'll cost for both a netflix subscription as well as a live gold one).